Color printers have become increasingly more commonplace with advances in printing technologies. High-quality, inexpensive color printers are readily commercially available in a wide variety of sizes ranging from portable and desktop inkjet printers for use at home or at the office, to commercial-grade large format printers.
Traditionally, printers were used primarily for printing text documents. Today, however, color printers are readily commercially available and are routinely used to print complex technical images, such as computer-aided design (CAD), mechanical CAD (MCAD), and geographic information system (GIS) images. The printed image is typically made from multiple passes of print heads which deposit ink onto a substrate.
Printer users are always looking for ways to reduce the cost per copy (also referred to as “C×C”—pronounced C-by-C), particularly in the large format market. Decisions to purchase a particular printer, determine who in an organization can use the printer, and how often, are guided by C×C considerations.
Some printers have an “economical” or “draft” print mode that uses up to about 40% less ink than the high quality print mode. The draft print mode uses less color saturation and represents a trade-off between image quality and ink consumption. But even draft print mode still takes time to print large fill areas. Other printers use more chromatic dye in the inks, enabling less ink to be used to provide comparable color saturation. But these inks can be expensive, at least partly defeating the motivation for reducing ink consumption.